Whoa! Didja get the numbers off that truck?!?

They Might Be Giants

I sometimes feel like there was a party going on and I missed it. All my friends were there, or at least people that I would consider my friends, all of us being like minded souls.

The party took place in the last decade before the turn of the century. I'm sorry I couldn't make it, I was busy being a Dad to my kids, plus I was mired in a lifeless marriage to a real stick-in-the-mud. I sometimes watch videotapes of myself during that time period. I hardly recognize me.

But I bet we would have had a really good time. There would probably have been some really great sex too.

The party probably featured some really great music from bands like They Might Be Giants. I've just recently discovered Flood, an album they released way way back in 1990 when my kids were five and three and my weekends featured diapers and drywall.

A woman came up to me and said
"iÃ­d like to poison your mind
With wrong ideas that appeal to you
Though I am not unkind"
She looked at me, I looked at something
Written across her scalp
And these are the words that it faintly said
As I tried to call for help:

ThereÃ­s only one thing that I know how to do well
And IÃ­ve often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well

And thatÃ­s be you,
Be what youÃ­re like,
Be like yourself,
And so IÃ­m having a wonderful time
But IÃ­d rather be whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
ThereÃ­s only one thing that I like
And that is whistling in the dark

There wasn't much time for being myself back in those days. I wasn't allowed to be myself because the person to whom I was married didn't like me that way. Eventually I escaped that prison but by that time the party-goers I never met had already left. Some embarked on lives of their own and married their own wrong partners. Of course they wouldn't discover the wrong-ness of it until much later, in plastic wrap catastrophes.